Hair resizing in SecondLife

Note:

Please read this tutorial from beginning to end BEFORE you start to try it out. Also, ALWAYS REMEMBER to resize a COPY of the original hair (you can copy the hair by right-clicking it, select „copy“, then right-click the folder you want the copy to go into, and select „paste“ – after that, you should rename your copy to something like „[hair name]-resized) instead of trying to resize the original hair.

The first thing you need to know about resizing hair is that there are basically just two sliders responsible for your hair to fit or not:

Those sliders, as you can see from the image, are located in the „Head“ adjustments and are called „Head size“ and „Head Stretch“. Just to demonstrate it…:

If I adjust my head size to „0“, the hair is practically overgrowing my head:

On the other hand, if I resize my head to 100, this is what happens – the hair is disappearing into my head:

This, of course, was just an explanation WHY hair doesn’t fit – note that I neglected the „Head stretch“ slider but still got interesting results. Adjusting the sliders of your head size and / or the head stretch, however, isn’t really an option to make hair fit.

Now what should you do if, for example, you buy one of my hair packages (which are all designed for a „50“ head size) – but you have a smaller head?

Example 1 – your head is SMALLER than the hair, but the hair partially fits (only some prims have to be adjusted)

You can see in the following image that while I’m wearing my hair in the usual „50“ size (for which it was designed), I have adjusted the head size slider to 25 – just to be able to demonstrate how to resize the hair:

As you can see, it’s not exactly TOO large on top of the head, but it’s practically growing out of my ears. I won’t need to resize the whole hair to make this fit, just the parts that are sticking through my ears. This is how I do it:

First, I get a posestand (there’s a free one available in my store, and also on the roof of my store), rezz it, right-click it, chose „SSC Pose“ and – voilà – I have assumed a pose which will keep me from moving while I am resizing my hair. This is more practical than to do it without a posestand, as I have learned.

Then I will use my mouse and the keys on my keyboard to cam around my head.

In case you’re not familiar with camming by mouse, here’s a simple explanation:

If you hold down your [ALT] key while moving the mouse over the screen, it will turn into a little magnifying glass. If you then move that magnifying glass over the object you wish to explore (your hair, in this case) and hold down the left mouse button, a forward/backward movement of the mouse will zoom in and out (focussing on the object), and left/right movements will make you pan around the object in question.

Additionally, you can hold down the [STRG]-Key (meaning [ALT] and [STRG] at the same time – if you hold your left mouse button when you’re on the object, this will allow you to pan around it in all directions.

In case you get lost while doing such panning / zooming actions, just release the mouse key and let your avatar take a step back (by using the arrow keys on the keyboard or by using the movement options on screen). This will always bring you back to your ‚usual‘ avatar view.

Okay – now that we’ve clarified this – pan & zoom on your hair until you see something like this:

on your screen. As you can probably see, the hair is just sticking through my ears, which is the part I want to correct. I will right-click the hair on screen, then select „edit“ – after that, I will see something like this:

Now look at the edit box, and check the box that says „Edit linked parts“ – like this:

and click just on the offending piece of hair that pierces through the ear. Should look like this now:

Now use the arrows – the red arrows, in this case, as they go from left to right – to push the offending piece of hair back through the ear. Check by panning / zooming if the piece of hair is still behind the ear (and hasn’t disappeared into the head) because that’s where it belongs.

Eventually, it will look like this:

As you can see, I’ve already selected the next offending prim – the part in front of the ear, which is a little too large. I will then resize this piece – either by checking the according button in the edit window (circled in red in the next picture) or by simply holding down the [STRG] and [SHIFT] keys while having the prim selected, which will also bring up the resizing option:

As this particular prim is not sticking out too far but just too wide down, I’ll resize it by grabbing the blue square and drag that up a bit until it’s smaller.

Now I’m finished:

Example 2 – your head is SMALLER than the hair and it’s all over too large (all prims have to be adjusted)

Here’s the next example – I’m wearing my „À la Pompadour“ hair on the too small head. As you can probably see, it’s all over too large.

So what I will do now is to resize the entire hair. Note that this will only work if none of the prims in the hair are already on their smallest size (as it unfortunately, for example, is with the „Antigone“ hairdo of mine, where some of the braid pieces are at the smallest possible size).

Again, I right-click the hair, select „edit“, and then I make sure the following, red-marked box is checked:

This will make sure that I evenly resize the hair, so that I don’t have to push it back to the middle of my head afterwards. I then either manually check the „Stretch“ option or hold down the [STRG] and [SHIFT] keys while having the prim selected, which will also bring up the resizing option.

Now I’ll select one of the white/grayish squares and drag it until the hair fits my head – the best point to control this are, again, the ears where the hair shouldn’t poke through:

Occasionally, it may happen that after resizing, you end up with the hair having the right size – just that it’s too high or too low on the head, like this picture illustrates:

You can see that the hair is way too high on my head, the gap between my ear and the hair is intolerable. So I’ll just go into the edit mode again…

…but this time I’ll stay in the standard edit mode, which is „Position“. This will bring up small arrows in the middle of the hair, as you can see. I select the blue arrow, since that’s the one going up and down, and drag it down until the hair is where it’s supposed to be:

That’s it – you’re finished:

Example 3 – your head is LARGER than the hair, but the hair partially fits (only some prims have to be adjusted)

Do what’s described in example 1, just don’t push the prims in (or make them smaller), but push them out (respectively enlarge them).

Example 4 – your head is SMALLER than the hair and it’s all over too large (all prims have to be adjusted)

Do what’s described in example 2, but don’t make the whole hair smaller, but bigger; then adjust the height if required.

That was it – my hair fitting tutorial 🙂 Hope you liked it, if you did, feel free to link to it.